anthonyjhicks.com

Alston and Telstra both helping keep Australia down today

Posted on 22 Jan 2002 in General

Aside from my intense hatred for Telstra, especially after today when new increased pricing plans for ADSL have been leaked on Whirlpool. I reserve a very special hatred for Richard Alston. I could write for hours about how this person has against all the best advice from actual experts in their respective fields, fucked up the national broadband rollout, cable television, digital television, and many other factors related to communications infrastructure in this country. Bowing to the pressure of the media companies, Telstra and through plain stupidity. Full marks for getting so much for the 3G spectrum auctions though.. hah!

Don’t get me started on what an incredible waste of money and resources it was to lay TWO coaxial cables around major cities and metropolitan areas when they had the opportunity to lay shared fibre, eliminating the current cable duopoloy for broadband internet and television services.

What gets me the most about Alston though is his aggressive stance on Internet censorship. It turns out the ABA is not actually releasing the list of banned web sites, as it’s censored! I can’t believe they’re actually working actively on Internet censorship, getting ready to issue the blocked sites to Australian ISP’s.

This is why I didn’t vote liberal in the last election, they are a bunch of bottom feeding scum (oh wait perhaps that applies to all of them). Anyway a vote for liberal, was definitely a vote for Internet censorship. Sorry to get so political, but Alston really fucks me off.

CORRECTION: Labor was in power at the time of the coaxial decision, although both sides were heavily lobbied to go with photonics, neither was convinced and instead supported the two cable coaxial decision. When the Libs won power, Alston happily continued the twin co-axial rollout. It’s amazing to think what an extraordinary lost opportunity this was in terms of communications infrastructure. Instead of pissing around with ADSL and capped broadband, we could have had terrabit bandwidth to every home in Australia. [Thanks DV and DG]

Net censorship a $2.5m waste

Posted on 15 May 2001 in General

Surprise surprise: “Although 290 complaints were received during the six months, only 139 were found to relate to prohibited content and, of these, only six were found to be hosted locally.”

http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0,3811,1998795%255E442,00.html

Winners of the Foil the Filters Contest

Posted on 04 Oct 2000 in General

DFN: “We hope this contest will help illustrate how unreliable censorware is and provide further examples for those interested in exposing it. And of these examples, these are our favorites….” [via fork]

http://dfn.org/Alerts/contest.htm

Australian DMCA reaches Senate

Posted on 27 Aug 2000 in General

Bad news. [via CM]

http://technocrat.net/966583745

Better than outright censorship

Posted on 01 Sep 1999 in General

“On Monday, the Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) released an updated draft of self-regulatory code of practice. In the draft, the IIA proposes pushing responsibility for content filtering as far down toward end users as possible.” (WIRED NEWS)

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/21515.html

welcome to the 50′s

Posted on 05 Jul 1999 in General

I have to mention the Internet Censorship legislation passed into law last week by our 1950′s government. The legislation was primarily implemented to win the vote of the independent Senator Brian Haradine for the Goods & Services Tax and the sale of the next portion of Telstra. Haradine (along with another Senator) held the balance of power and were therefore able to hold the government to ransom to implement their own policies in exchange for a GST vote. Some reports say that Australia now has tougher Internet censorship laws than Malaysia and Singapore, in summary the government will (through the Australia Broadcasting Authority) control content with a set of ratings. ISPs will be required to remove “abhorrent” (??) material from their servers and block access to overseas servers. The ignorance of our government is the laughing stock of the worldwide Internet community. There was an interesting thread about this on slashdot.org discussing how quiet the Australian media has been on the issue and the reasons why the legislation was put through. We also get a little bit of beating as being a backward country as far as the Internet is concerned with no control over our government.. hrmm maybe.